Chapter 2 #2
The shooting had stopped. When he reached the aspens overlooking the clearing, he saw Henry working his way down the hill, his Winchester against his shoulder. He was approaching the tarps like he’d found a grizzly going through a supper he’d prepared.
There was no sign of the escaped Mad Dog. Caleb figured he was probably halfway to Santa Fe by now.
He descended the hill. As he picked up his rifle and hat, Henry caught sight of him. He waited where he was until Caleb reached him.
“Got him,” Henry said proudly, gesturing toward the tarps.
“About damn time.”
“Miss Burnett’ll be proud,” Henry said.
Caleb frowned. “Of what?”
“You only killed the ones who absolutely insisted on it.”
“Keep talking.”
Henry grinned.
A groan of pain reached them.
“So, you got him?” Caleb asked with a smirk.
“You know how I feel about the sanctity of life,” Henry replied with a straight face. “When I said got him, I meant I winged him.”
“Uh-huh.”
John Rivers lay squirming on the ground by a bed roll, clutching his side. His pistols lay just out of reach.
Caleb set down his rifle, crossed to the man, and pulled the knife from his boot. He tossed it toward Henry, who'd gathered up Rivers's six-guns. The killer let out a terrible moan as Caleb rolled him onto his side. The bullet had torn clean through the flesh just above the hip.
“You’ll live, Rivers,” he said, drawing a surprised look from the man. “Till they get a rope around your neck.”
“Don’t know nobody named Rivers,” the man managed to get out between panting breaths. “You got the wrong fella.”
Caleb ignored him and turned to Henry. “You know, if you could shoot worth a damn, we coulda saved ourselves a ride into Elkhorn.”
“It ain’t too late,” his partner replied. “I’m sure I can hit him from here.”
The two men looked at the wide-eyed Rivers.
“Go ahead,” the outlaw gasped. “Save us all a heap of trouble.”
“Hell, I need to pick up a bag of nails for the barn, anyway.” Caleb shook his head walking away. “Truss him up while I bring them horses over.”
Before Henry could cut a length of rope from the lines holding the tarps, a rifle shot rang out, and Caleb spun around to see his friend’s hat tumbling to the ground.
Caleb’s Colt was in his hand in an instant, but before he even turned to look for the gunman, he knew it wasn’t Mad Dog.
He’d taken off with only his short-barreled revolvers, riding bareback.
His rifle was sitting by the fire. But that didn’t mean this outfit didn’t have a sixth man riding with them.
Not far from the spot where Caleb had first talked to these outlaws, their neighbor to the east stood with his Yellow Boy rifle trained on Henry.
“Hold on there.”
Stubbs lowered his rifle a little, but Caleb saw that Henry had cleared leather and was ready to drop their neighbor in his tracks. His partner’s face was on fire.
Caleb took a step toward Henry. “Don’t.”
“The sonovabitch nearly took my head off.”
He lowered his pistol, but he wasn’t ready to pouch the iron. Caleb didn’t blame him.
Stubbs came down the hill, eyeing them warily. “What are you doing, Marlowe, working men on my land?”
Caleb had only spoken to Stubbs a few times, but that was more than enough.
The man was mean-tempered, suspicious, and far too fond of settling disagreements with a rifle.
Their last conversation had involved Caleb staring down the barrel of that Yellow Boy.
It had not improved relations between them.
“You and me have already covered this ground. This ain’t your land, Stubbs.”
As he reached them, the man spat a stream of tobacco juice. “Who says?”
Frank Stubbs had to be close to forty, but he was as hard and tough as an old oak root.
From beneath a battered brown bowler, stringy hair hung nearly to his shoulders.
Worn-out pants were stuffed into scarred boots.
The only hints at any prosperity were his rifle and a silver ribbon trailing from his vest pocket.
He was tall and lanky, with a long horse face bulging on one side with a cheek full of chaw. A heavy mustache drooped around his hard mouth. His nose was hooked and battered, and a scar split his left eyebrow, adding to the overall fierceness of the man.
Caleb’s patience with this bonehead was running thin, but he slid his Colt into its holster. “That ridge a half mile behind you is the boundary between our properties.”
“Don’t matter. I seen these mangy dogs on the other side. You got them prospecting on my land. I followed this one down here just now.” He pointed the rifle at Henry.
“You are one stupid sonovabitch,” Henry growled. “You know I part own this ranch. You seen me at the Belle.”
Stubbs’s eyes narrowed. “Who you calling stupid? I’ve a mind to put a hole in—”
“Back off,” Caleb barked.
Stubbs spat on the ground. “Matter of fact, I do remember you. We had words, you and me. You had my whore sitting on yer lap. You was playing cards with my woman cuddled up to you.”
“Your woman? Mariah still got marks you gave her. She says she wants nothing to do with you.”
“She’s a cheap lying whore. But she’s my whore.”
“Mariah left you.”
“She's still mine.”
“That ain't what she says.”
“You think you're some kinda hero?”
“No. I just listened when she asked me for help,” Henry snapped. “She’d sooner sleep with a dying skunk than spend five minutes with you.”
“I shoulda kicked in yer pretty face right then.”
“I always wear this face right here in the open, where any stupid, drunken sonovabitch can take a crack at it…if he’s got the balls to try.”
“That right?”
“But as I recall, you went a-slinking out with your limp tail hanging between your quivering hind legs.”
“I shoulda kilt you that night. Yer just lucky you had them boys to back you.” Stubbs stopped and looked at Rivers and the two dead outlaws. “Matter of fact, these are the same mangy coyotes that was with you. I knowed it. They been working for you this whole time.”
“You’re a low down, two-faced, lying piece of shit, Stubbs.”
“One of us is. And I think maybe it’s time we settled it, once and for all.”
“I think maybe it is,” Henry replied, his voice as cold as Wyoming winter wind.
Caleb had taken part in enough gunfights to know that if he let this rattle on, one of these men would die.
It was exactly the sort of foolishness Sheila would call a waste of perfectly good breath.
For once, he agreed with her.
The jawing was done, and the air between the two men had gone still and tight the way it does before a storm breaks. But before he could step in, a shot from the edge of the clearing cut through it, echoing off the distant ridge.
Zeke Vernon, looking for all the world like a gray boar in a stovepipe hat, sat astride his bay mare. Smoke curled from his Winchester ’73. Elkhorn’s burly sheriff was flanked by two deputies, and that made three rifles currently pointed at the combatants.
“Lay them irons down, boys,” he growled. “I ain’t shot nobody today, but it’s still early.”